Chris Huhne supports Clegg on walk-out and EU poisition

In tomorrow's GMTV Sunday programme, Chris Huhne strongly supports Nick Clegg's Commons walk-out:

I think Nick has been absolutely right on this and we entirely agree both on the European issue and on the way in which we protested over the ruling that our vote would not be called because, frankly, for a major opposition party with more than a fifth of the votes in the country, to be denied the chance to put, to the votes in the House of Commons, an issue that was a manifesto promise for us is frankly outrageous, and if you look at the normal Commons procedures they're already stacked massively against us, so David Cameron for example gets six questions at Prime Minister's questions, Nick gets two questions at Prime Minister's questions, but even if you look at that sort of ration in terms of votes on amendments coming up we've been through more than six days of debate on this EU Lisbon treaty in which every single day it was a Tory amendment that was called, and for the first time we said 'we want a Liberal Democrat amendment to be called so that we can vote on it precisely because it was a matter in our manifesto. In my view the speaker was extremely ill-judged to refuse that.

It is also good to see Chris robustly defending the party's stance on the EU Reform treaty:

I think that one of the issues that comes up with my constituency is that they actually want, even if they're pro-European as I am, to have a chance to reach a judgement about all of the changes that we've had over time, not just the recent EU reform treaty, but the much more major changes such as the Maastrict treaty, the Single European Act, which the last Conservative government pushed through without a referendum even though we weren't pushing for it, and one of the reasons why we promised in the General Election that we should have a referendum on the constitutional treaty is precisely because the constitutional treaty re-wrote everything, it summed up all of the previous treaties, it was a 157,00 words long whereas the reform treaty is a mere sliver of a thing at 44,000 words long, so these are very different animals and the nearest thing to the promise we made at the General Election that we would have a referendum on the constitutional treaty is a referendum on whether we stay in or out….

Chris also makes it clear that there is a fundamental difference between the Reform treaty and the previously intended constitution:

...the constitutional concept has disappeared, the complete new writing has disappeared and we've got, by the way, substantial changes in our opt-outs on justice and home affairs, we can now opt in or opt out almost like going into a restaurant and choosing from the menu, so we've had very different arrangements to what we had then. So, for all of those reasons, we think that the right referendum, without question to have a referendum, is whether we should stay in or out, and, by the way, the reform treaty, also, for the first time in article 49A says that a member state secede, so this is an appropriate referendum given the Reform treaty's new provisions for a member state to get out.